IV

I come now to the democratic section.

A. "The free basis of the state."

First of all, according to II, the German Workers' party strives for "the
free state".

Free state — what is this?

It is by no means the aim of the workers, who have got rid of
the narrow mentality of humble subjects, to set the state free. In the
German Empire, the "state" is almost as "free" as in Russia. Freedom consists
in converting the state from an organ superimposed upon society into one
completely subordinate to it; and today, too, the forms of state are more
free or less free to the extent that they restrict the "freedom of the
state".

The German Workers' party — at least if it adopts the program
— shows that its socialist ideas are not even skin-deep; in that, instead
of treating existing society (and this holds good for any future one) as
the basis of the existing state (or of the future state in the case
of future society), it treats the state rather as an independent entity
that possesses its own intellectual, ethical, and libertarian bases.

And what of the riotous misuse which the program makes of the
words "present-day state", "present-day society", and of the still more
riotous misconception it creates in regard to the state to which it addresses
its demands?

"Present-day society" is capitalist society, which exists in all
civilized countries, more or less free from medieval admixture, more or
less modified by the particular historical development of each country,
more or less developed. On the other hand, the "present-day state" changes
with a country's frontier. It is different in the Prusso-German Empire
from what it is in Switzerland, and different in England from what it is
in the United States. The "present-day state" is therefore a fiction.

Nevertheless, the different states of the different civilized
countries, in spite or their motley diversity of form, all have this in
common: that they are based on modern bourgeois society, only one more
or less capitalistically developed. They have, therefore, also certain
essential characteristics in common. In this sense, it is possible to speak
of the "present-day state" in contrast with the future, in which its present
root, bourgeois society, will have died off.

The question then arises: What transformation will the state undergo
in communist society? In other words, what social functions will remain
in existence there that are analogous to present state functions? This
question can only be answered scientifically, and one does not get a flea-hop
nearer to the problem by a thousand-fold combination of the word 'people'
with the word 'state'.

Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period
of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding
to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be
nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.

Now the program does not deal with this nor with the future state
of communist society.

Its political demands contain nothing beyond the old democratic
litany familiar to all: universal suffrage, direct legislation, popular
rights, a people's militia, etc. They are a mere echo of the bourgeois
People's party, of the League of Peace and Freedom. They are all demands
which, insofar as they are not exaggerated in fantastic presentation, have
already been realized. Only the state to which they belong does
not lie within the borders of the German Empire, but in Switzerland, the
United States, etc. This sort of "state of the future" is a present-day
state, although existing outside the "framework" of the German Empire.

But one thing has been forgotten. Since the German Workers' party
expressly declares that it acts within "the present-day national state",
hence within its own state, the Prusso-German Empire — its demands would
indeed be otherwise largely meaningless, since one only demands what one
has not got — it should not have forgotten the chief thing, namely, that
all those pretty little gewgaws rest on the recognition of the so-called
sovereignty of the people and hence are appropriate only in a democratic
republic.

Since one has not the courage — and wisely so, for the circumstances
demand caution — to demand the democratic republic, as the French workers'
programs under Louis Philippe and under Louis Napoleon did, one should
not have resorted, either, to the subterfuge, neither "honest" [1] nor decent,
of demanding things which have meaning only in a democratic republic from
a state which is nothing but a police-guarded military despotism, embellished
with parliamentary forms, alloyed with a feudal admixture, already influenced
by the bourgeoisie, and bureaucratically carpentered, and then to assure
this state into the bargain that one imagines one will be able to force
such things upon it "by legal means".

Even vulgar democracy, which sees the millennium in the democratic
republic, and has no suspicion that it is precisely in this last form of
state of bourgeois society that the class struggle has to be fought out
to a conclusion — even it towers mountains above this kind of democratism,
which keeps within the limits of what is permitted by the police and not
permitted by logic.

That, in fact, by the word "state" is meant the government machine,
or the state insofar as it forms a special organism separated from society
through division of labor, is shown by the words "the German Workers' party
demands as the economic basis of the state: a single progressive income
tax", etc. Taxes are the economic basis of the government machinery and
of nothing else. In the state of the future, existing in Switzerland, this
demand has been pretty well fulfilled. Income tax presupposes various sources
of income of the various social classes, and hence capitalist society.
It is, therefore, nothing remarkable that the Liverpool financial reformers
— bourgeois headed by Gladstone's brother — are putting forward the same
demand as the program.

B. "The German Workers' party demands as the intellectual and ethical
basis of the state:
"1. Universal and equal elementary education by the state.
Universal compulsory school attendance. Free instruction."

"Equal elementary education"? What idea lies behind these words? Is it
believed that in present-day society (and it is only with this one has
to deal) education can be equal for all classes? Or is it demanded
that the upper classes also shall be compulsorily reduced to the modicum
of education — the elementary school — that alone is compatible with
the economic conditions not only of the wage-workers but of the peasants
as well?

"Universal compulsory school attendance. Free instruction." The
former exists even in Germany, the second in Switzerland and in the United
States in the case of elementary schools. If in some states of the latter
country higher education institutions are also "free", that only means
in fact defraying the cost of education of the upper classes from the general
tax receipts. Incidentally, the same holds good for "free administration
of justice" demanded under A, 5. The administration of criminal justice
is to be had free everywhere; that of civil justice is concerned almost
exclusively with conflicts over property and hence affects almost exclusively
the possessing classes. Are they to carry on their litigation at the expense
of the national coffers?

This paragraph on the schools should at least have demanded technical
schools (theoretical and practical) in combination with the elementary
school.

"Elementary education by the state" is altogether objectionable.
Defining by a general law the expenditures on the elementary schools, the
qualifications of the teaching staff, the branches of instruction, etc.,
and, as is done in the United States, supervising the fulfillment of these
legal specifications by state inspectors, is a very different thing from
appointing the state as the educator of the people! Government and church
should rather be equally excluded from any influence on the school. Particularly,
indeed, in the Prusso-German Empire (and one should not take refuge in
the rotten subterfuge that one is speaking of a "state of the future";
we have seen how matters stand in this respect) the state has need, on
the contrary, of a very stern education by the people.

But the whole program, for all its democratic clang, is tainted
through and through by the Lassallean sect's servile belief in the state,
or, what is no better, by a democratic belief in miracles; or rather it
is a compromise between these two kinds of belief in miracles, both equally
remote from socialism.

"Freedom of conscience"! If one desired, at this time of the Kulturkampf
to remind liberalism of its old catchwords,
it surely could have been done only in the following form: Everyone should
be able to attend his religious as well as his bodily needs without the
police sticking their noses in. But the Workers' party ought, at any rate
in this connection, to have expressed its awareness of the fact that bourgeois
"freedom of conscience" is nothing but the toleration of all possible kinds
of religious freedom of conscience, and that for its part it endeavours rather to liberate the conscience from the witchery of religion. But one
chooses not to transgress the "bourgeois" level.

I have now come to the end, for the appendix that now follows
in the program does not constitute a characteristic component part of it.
Hence, I can be very brief.